Creating certificate profiles for Samsung TV

Samsung Smart TV provides various tools for its developers to create applications for its various platforms. The developers can develop applications and can publish then in the Smart TV app store for other devices to download and use these apps. While uploading to the app store, the applications must follow some rules to be able to publish themselves successfully. These publishing rules applies for all the applications that are about to be published to the store. The publishing rules are defined by the Tizen policy. The applications that do not obey the publishing rules will not be published to the store. One among the most important rule of publishing is that all the published applications must be digitally signed by a certificate profile. This digital signing is mandatory for all the published apps. This article is about creating a certificate profile, so that the user can sign the application that is developed.

Certificate Profile

The Smart TV environment helps the developer to create the needed certificate profile by providing them tools. The certificate manager can be accessed from Tools -> certificate manager from the Tizen studio. Once the certificate manager window opens, make sure to close the Tizen TV window. If the Tizen studio is less than 2.1, not closing the studio will lock the system because of a bug. So if your Tizen TV studio is less than 2.1 make sure to close the IDE as soon as the certificate manager window opens. A certificate profile is a set of certificates that the user uses to sign the application. Each certificate profile consists of a single author profile and can contain multiple distributor profiles. Once the profile is created, the developer can use it to digitally sign the applications created and also to sign the associated updates for that corresponding application.

Creating a certificate profile

Creating a certificate profile is very easy using the certificate manager. The certificate manager provides the option to create new certificate or also to migrate an existing certificate. Normal cases involves the creation of new certificates. The user can skip the certification migration step.

Add new certificate

The plus button on the certificate manager window will prompt the user to enter the type of certificate. The user will have to select the type as Samsung TV.

Device type selection

Once the TV type is selected, the user will be prompted for the details of author certificate. Each certificate profile has an author certificate and few distributor certificates. The user will have to enter the name for the certificate, and the option to create a new certificate or reuse an existing certificate. Once the user selects the new certificate option, it prompts for a password.

Username and Password for author certificate

Then the developer have to log in to his Samsung account. Once he logs in, he will be prompted to save the created certificate into a secure location.

Save created certificate

After saving, the user can further create a new author certificate or reuse an existing certificate as mentioned previously. Next the user will be prompted to create a new distributor certificate. Here the user will have to select the privilege type of the certificate, and the password, and then he will have to enter the UUID of the device to which the signed application has to be installed for testing.

Add device UUID

The next step is the final and will create the certificate profile which the user uses to digitally sign the developed applications.

Conclusion

Once the certificate profile is created, the user can select the list of selected devices and choose his device of choice. Then he has to select one of the connected device to install his application. After selecting the device, the user will have to select a particular folder from the side and right click and have to enable the Permit to install application permission. Once this is enabled, the user can install the digitally signed application in the TV.